Censoring Winston
Ruth Ive describes how, as a young woman, her job was to interrupt the wartime conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt.
Incredible as it now seems, during the Second World War no conventional international telephone service operated between Britain and the United States. In July 1940 the underwater cable running across the Atlantic was fractured on the instructions of the British and Canadian censorship authorities. But with the entry of the United States into the war, the GPO was instructed to work with AT&T in the USA and the Bell Telephone Company in Ottawa to establish a transatlantic radio link. The only available security device was a simple A3 Scrambler, developed before the war by AT&T for commercial purposes. While this could deter casual eavesdroppers, it was soon realised that a determined electronic engineer could easily unscramble the conversations.
Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, warned that, so far as the enemy was concerned, all radio calls on this system should be looked upon as having no more security than if they were made from a public call box. It should be assumed therefore that the calls were being monitored by the enemy.
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